Story by Liz Benneian
As anyone who has tried it
knows, making a living as an actor isn’t easy. And so when the necessity of
paying the rent and buying groceries caught up with Peter Gruner and Deb
Dagenais, two aspiring actors from Montreal, the couple gave up their dreams of
making it in the theatre/movie scene and turned to more prosaic careers. But
life has a funny way of spiraling back to its centre.
The actor, turned IT professional,
turned playwright, recalls the Tarot of theatre was foretelling his future
right from the start when he and his future wife were cast in the same play. “We
played husband and wife and when her mother came to see the show and Deb
introduced me she said, ’Mom, meet my husband . . .”
The couple married, moved to
Toronto, attempted and abandoned acting careers, had three children and became
engrossed in childrearing and soccer. And then, after a 20-year absence from
the stage, Gruner answered a casting call for a community theatre production in
Burlington. He was re-hooked.
“I didn’t realize how much I
missed it,” he says. “There’s nothing like hearing an audience laugh when you
think they’re going to laugh.”
The play, Norm Foster’s Kiss the Moon, Kiss The Sun , an
emotionally charged exploration of the relationship between a disabled man and
a young pregnant woman, pushed Gruner as an actor, drawing his audience to
laughter and tears and winning him a best actor award for his performance.
The immediate positive
feedback on his return to theatre spurred him on to take the next step. He
signed up for a playwriting course offered by the Pearl Company, a theatre,
gallery and arts facility, in Hamilton. Those enrolled were promised that, at
the completion of their course, the three best plays would be produced. Gruner’s
Laund-o-mat at the End of the World
was one of the three plays chosen.
Premiered at The Pearl and
later taken to Hamilton’s Fringe Festival and for a run at Theatre Aquarius, Laund-o-mat at the End of the World was
described by one reviewer as “part morality play, part cautionary tale, part
love story . . . this is a gem.”
It was rewarding for Gruner to
blend into the audience and hear people discussing his play at they left the
theatre. “It seemed to touch people,” he says.
Writing, for Gruner, was a
continuation of an interest that began when he was a student of theatre and
English at McGill and was part of a comedy troupe. One of his friends had a
radio program and the group performed on it regularly, writing their own skits.
As an adult, Gruner took
courses in writing fiction and screenplays before trying his hand at
playwriting. He didn’t find it difficult but perhaps that was because the idea
for Laund-o-mat had been swimming
around inside his head ever since he read a Ray Bradbury Science Fiction story
when he was in High School.
The idea for his next play Cast Party arose from the stories he
heard actors tell from their various community theatre experiences. That play,
which Gruner also directed, was performed as part of Hamilton’s Black Box Fire’s
Emerging Artist Series.
He concedes directing was by
turns both a heart-stopping and exhilarating experience and jokes that through
it he kept reminding himself of a quote from The Last Lecture: “obstacles are
not put there to stop us but to test how determined we are”.
Despite some handwringing over
the ultimately successful Cast Party — as Gruner points out, “with theatre
there’s always drama” — his rekindled love of theatre hasn’t been tamped
down.
Recently, Gruner has completed
a third play and is working on a fourth. He also collaborated with Hamilton
area actress Shari Vandermolen on a musical called I’ll Be Seeing You that was part of this summer’s Fringe Festival
in Hamilton.
The actor, turned IT guy,
turned writer/director couldn’t be more pleased to find himself back in the
swirl of the spotlights.
“It’s been a labour of love. I
always pictured myself being a writer. Having the opportunity to not only write
but get the plays performed has been very gratifying,” he says.